As the holiday season approaches, your desk drawers are likely to start filling up with gift cards: those plastic rectangles that seem like money but so often sit unused, forgotten and forlorn.
The U.S. gift card market is estimated at more than $200 billion, yet the industry is dominated by two little-known companies, Blackhawk and InComm, and has seen little innovation in recent decades, even as mobile payment solutions like Apple Pay and Google Pay have grown in popularity.
